There's Trouble Brewing

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  That ‘sir’, and a touch of commonness in Mrs Bunnett’s accent—quite different from the timid but ladylike tones of last night—startled Nigel. Eustace Bunnett must have married ‘beneath him’; his death had freed Emily from all his careful ‘training’: now, at last, she could be herself again; this was the real Emily Bunnett.

  The inspector, too, had been a little disconcerted by that word ‘sir’. Its effect on him, though, was that unconsciously he reassumed something of the loud aggressive voice in which he had spoken to the cleaner at the brewery.

  ‘You’re telling me that, although your husband did not come down to breakfast, although later you found his bed had not been slept in, you took no action whatsoever about it? You did not even ring up the brewery to make inquiries?’

  As though the bullying note in his voice reminded her of Eustace, reminded her that she was supposed to be ‘a lady’, Emily Bunnett answered in her old, genteel tones:

  ‘Yes, no, I mean. You see, my husband very much resented interference of any sort. He wouldn’t like—wouldn’t have liked the idea of my fussing about him. If he’d found out that I’d been making inquiries at the brewery, I mean, he’d have been very angry.’

  ‘But surely, when his bed had not been slept in—after all, didn’t that strike you as—unusual, shall we say?’

  Mrs Bunnett’s fingers twisted about her handkerchief. Her cheeks flushed a deeper red. At last she raised her head and said in a tiny, defiant voice:

  ‘Well, it wasn’t unusual. So there. It had happened several times before.’

  ‘What the devil——’

  Dr Cammison interrupted the inspector’s outburst, saying quietly:

  ‘You mean, your husband used to—go to other women?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Bunnett’s voice was almost inaudible. ‘And if he couldn’t get them here, he used to go off and stay with women in Paris on his holidays. He never troubled to conceal it from me. He despised me too much to take the trouble——’ Her voice broke, and at last she was weeping.

  They did not stay much longer. Joe Bunnett’s return from his holiday was imperatively necessary, but Emily knew no more of his movements than that he had sailed from Poolhampton and would be cruising around Land’s End and up the Welsh Coast. Tyler would have to notify the various possible ports of call, and leave it at that. The Bunnetts’ servant deposed that she had heard the master and mistress come in about 11.20 last night, and then had gone to sleep. The inspector inquired the name of Bunnett’s dentist, so that the sets of false teeth might be identified. After one or two more questions, they went out. The time for the post-mortem was arranged, and Tyler took a curt leave of the other two.

  ‘Mrs Bunnett didn’t look too broken-hearted. And I don’t wonder,’ said Nigel as they walked up the steep, narrow street. ‘A deliverance from bondage—that’s what it must be for her. When Israel came out of Egypt!’

  Herbert Cammison looked at him sharply.

  ‘The first thing she said, when I told her that we feared her husband was dead, was “Dead? Eustace dead? You’re telling me the truth? Is he really dead at last? I can’t believe it.” It was the shock, of course; she was not responsible for what she was saying,’ he added meaningly.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Nigel without expression.

  ‘It gave me a turn, I can tell you. She looked as if I’d brought her a present. Flushed; her hair tumbling down; pathetic. You noticed her accent, too, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Funny. I’d never suspected it. Well, that’s that. And see here, young Nigel, none of this to Tyler. That man’s too ambitious. All he’s going to be concerned about is to make an arrest—and as quickly as possible. He’d clap Mrs Bunnett into jail on the strength of what I’ve just told you. Tollworthy’s a good sort. I’ve played a lot of cricket with him. But we’ll have to watch our step with Tyler, believe me. There’s only one word for that man——’

  Dr Cammison stated the word.

  ‘A meiosis, if anything,’ said Nigel.

  IV

  July 17, 8.55–10.30 p.m.

  One Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain, A mere anatomy.

  SHAKESPEARE, The Comedy of Errors

  ‘DO YOU REALLY like drinking your coffee off the floor?’ asked Sophie Cammison. ‘There is a little table beside you.’

  Nigel took up his cup from the floor and held it in his lap. He was sitting with his back against one of the arms of his deep arm-chair and his legs over the other. The carpet beside him was littered with cigarette-ash. Sophie glanced at it and sighed, half-vexed, half in resignation. Nigel really was an untidy creature. What was the use of leaving ash-trays about at every possible strategic point of the house, when he just ignored them? It was odd that she should still be able to get fussed about such a ridiculous little thing, after what Herbert had told her while she was dressing for dinner. Eustace Bunnett was dead, and here she was fussing over cigarette-ash. Dust unto dust; ashes unto ashes. She could scarcely believe it yet.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘I was thinking how silly it was of me to mind about your cigarette-ash when—well, when all this has just happened.’

  ‘Cigarette-ash? Oh, I say, I really am very sorry. What an awful mess I’ve made. I am quite bestially untidy.’

  Nigel’s face looked comically concerned, like a small boy’s who is about to burst into tears. He writhed out of the chair, nearly upsetting his coffee-cup in the process, took coal-shovel and brush out of the fireplace and began to sweep up the mess. Mrs Cammison studied him over her knitting. He was entirely absorbed in what he was doing; his clumsy movements both touched and irritated her. How childish men were in their absorption over trifling things! It was impossible to imagine that this flushed awkward creature, who was so ineptly wielding brush and shovel, had ever followed a murderer through the distorted-mirror-world of his imagination, had written a book on the Caroline poets, had married one of the most remarkable women of her age.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Do what?’ said Nigel, twisting upright on his knees and glancing at her quizzically. ‘I should have thought this was the least reparation I could make for ruining your nice carpet.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ said Sophie, a little annoyed by the implication that she was one of those rabidly house-proud women, ‘I mean, why do you mix yourself up in crime?’

  ‘Sometimes one can’t help getting mixed up,’ he said lightly.

  Sophie Cammison’s fingers paused a moment in their knitting. When they commenced again, it was unlike their usual mechanical movements, Nigel thought: it was as though she had flashed a message to them—Go on! Knit, I tell you. Knit! You mustn’t break down just now! She said:

  ‘But that’s only sometimes. Why did you ever take it up?’

  ‘Oh, something to do, I suppose. It seemed to be the only profession for which a classical education fitted one.’

  ‘Now you are laughing at me. I’m quite serious.’

  ‘So am I. It does. If ever, in your salad days—as one of my comic uncles calls them—you were compelled to do a Latin unseen, you’ll know that it presents an accurate parallel with criminal detection. You have a long sentence, full of inversions; just a jumble of words it looks at first. That is what a crime looks like at first sight, too. The subject is a murdered man; the verb is the modus operandi, the way the crime was committed; the object is the motive. Those are the three essentials of every sentence and every crime. First you find the subject, then you look for the verb, and the two of them lead you to the object. But you have not discovered the criminal—the meaning of the whole sentence yet. There are a number of subordinate clauses, which may be clues or red-herrings, and you’ve got to separate them from each other in your own mind and reconstruct them to fit and to amplify the meaning of the whole. It’s an exercise in analysis and synthesis—the very best training for detectives.’

&
nbsp; ‘But, really,’ exclaimed Sophie, rather overwhelmed by all this, ‘it sounds dreadfully dry and cold-blooded. You’re leaving out the human element altogether.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m not,’ said Nigel dogmatically. ‘Of course it’s only an analogy, and no analogy holds true at every point. But to return to classical education. You learn to write Latin and Greek compositions in the style of certain authors. The first thing you learn is that all the best authors are constantly breaking the rules of the grammar-books; each has his own idiosyncracies; and that is equally true of the criminal—the murderer in particular. To write a good Latin or Greek composition requires more than a superficial gift of mimicry; it requires that you should get right inside the head and the skin of your model. You’ve got to try and think and feel like Thucydides or Livy or Cicero or Sophocles or Virgil. Similarly, a detective has to get right inside the character of a criminal if he is successfully to reconstruct the crime.’

  Mrs Cammison looked at her guest in amazement. Did he really believe all this nonsense, or—no, she realised it now—he was talking away just to keep her mind off things, off that appalling vision of Eustace Bunnett sagging, a mess of bone and hair, inside the copper. Did he know how that vision was haunting her mind? Well, he had enabled her to forget it for a few minutes and she should be grateful for that. But did he also suspect the infinitely more horrible thing, that, as yet, she had not dared even to admit into the daylight of her mind—that she fought to repel, eyes tight closed, refusing so much as a glance at its dreaded features? Suddenly she felt frightened of Nigel. She wished that Herbert was here; but he had been called away to a case in the middle of dinner.

  ‘You do knit a lot, don’t you?’ said Nigel. ‘You must have a packet of nephews and nieces.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sophie. Then, answering the question that she felt (quite mistakenly) must lie behind Nigel’s remark—‘Herbert and I decided not to have children till—till we were more settled.’

  ‘How long have you been married?’

  ‘Nearly three years. We married when Herbert bought his partnership here.’

  ‘You would make a very good mother, I should think.’

  Sophie felt she could not bear this line of conversation any longer. She might burst out weeping any moment. It was to kill this weakness that she said rather strenuously:

  ‘But I don’t see why you want to hunt criminals. I’m sure you can’t enjoy it. You don’t have to for a living. Do you believe in Justice or something?’

  Nigel was gazing non-committally down his nose. ‘Hallo, what’s this?’ he said to himself. ‘What is making her attack me like this? What is she trying to hide from me—or from herself?’ He said to Mrs Cammison:

  ‘I don’t believe in justice in the abstract. Some crimes are “just” and some actions are criminal. I suppose I do it because criminal investigation gives one a unique opportunity of studying people in the nude, so to speak. People involved in a case—particularly murder—are always on the alert, on the defensive, and it’s when they’re trying to cover up one part of their mind that they expose the rest. Even quite normal people start behaving in the most abnormal way.’

  ‘You sound quite inhuman,’ Sophie said in a trembling voice.

  ‘No. There’s nothing inhuman about curiosity. And mine is only trained, scientific curiosity. I’m sorry, though; I’m upsetting you, talking like this. I’m not a monster, really. To tell you the truth, I’ve pretty well made up my mind not to touch this Bunnett affair. Whoever did him in had every excuse, I should think.’

  ‘You’re probably right there,’ said a deep voice from behind Nigel, ‘but I shouldn’t talk too soon about giving the case up.’

  Dr Cammison had entered, unnoticed by the other two. His square-jawed face, with its black jowl, swarthy complexion and deep brown eyes—together with his silent, unobtrusive, beautifully controlled movements as he closed the door and came up to them—made Nigel think of a black panther. His eyes regarded Nigel, bright and unwinking.

  ‘Well,’ said Nigel, ‘how you do chop and change. Only this morning you were telling me to lay off the Truffles case. And now–—! Ah, well; as old Tacitus said, Supervacuus inter sanos medicus or—we may roughly translate it—“When the doctor is amongst sane people, he appears even more vacuous than usual.”’

  ‘“Rough” is scarcely the word for that translation,’ said Dr Cammison, his white teeth flashing in one of his sudden, rare grins. ‘But Truffles dead is one thing and Bunnett dead is another.’

  ‘Adequately, if somewhat sententiously expressed.’

  ‘You see, a considerable number of people would have liked to see Eustace Bunnett liquidated—I apologise for the unfortunate accuracy of the term.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So——’

  ‘Herbert!’

  The anguish of Sophie Cammison’s voice struck Nigel like something solid hurled at him. He found himself for a moment quite breathless. Even Herbert’s composure was ruffled. He looked doubtfully at his wife.

  ‘It’s all very well, my dear,’ he said slowly, ‘but——’

  ‘Look here, you two,’ said Nigel, recovering himself. ‘I didn’t want to gate-crash into your private troubles. It was obvious to me, from the moment I arrived, that Sophie had something on her mind—something to do with Eustace Bunnett.’

  ‘I thought—I don’t see how you could think that,’ she interposed hurriedly.

  ‘Whenever his name was mentioned, you had to steel yourself to behaving quite normally. And it showed. The one person a mimic cannot mimic successfully is his normal self.’

  ‘This is all getting rather metaphysical,’ said Dr Cammison. ‘It’s no use, Sophie. We’ve got to tell him. For all you know, we may be needing his help before long.’

  ‘His help?’—Understanding dawned in Sophie’s eyes. She gripped the arms of her chair. It was the only way she could stop her hands shaking. Herbert leant over the back of her chair and put his hands on her shoulders. He began to talk, a touch of professional pedantry in his words.

  ‘I had a good deal to do with Bunnett, one way and another. Soon after we came here, he wished to consult me. It was very awkward. Annerley was his doctor, and medical etiquette—as you know—does not permit one to treat another man’s patient without his permission. I told Bunnett this, of course. He said that Annerley was a—er, that he was not satisfied with Annerley and that I would be a fool not to take the case. His money was as good as anyone else’s. All that sort of thing. I told him—rather stiffly, I suppose—that we did not do things that way. It must have been the first time anyone had opposed him for years. He got very angry, raved about medical mumbo-jumbo, and so on. I thought that would be the end of it. But the next I heard was that he’d had a row with Annerley and refused to have anything more to do with him. Then he came to me again. Annerley was very decent about it. So that was that. I took Bunnett’s case. He thought he’d got a gastric ulcer or peritonitis or something: in a regular panic he was. It was nothing of the sort, of course. I put him on a diet—the same diet, no doubt, that Annerley would have recommended, and he very soon recovered. Unfortunately, he then began to get matey with us, always inviting us down to dinner, sending cases of wine—that kind of thing. I couldn’t stand the fellow personally, and I was beginning to hear things about the brewery that I liked still less. I couldn’t imagine what his motive was, making up to me like this. Then it became painfully apparent. He, er——’

  ‘He began to get fresh with me,’ said Mrs Cammison. ‘Horrible little man! It was ludicrous, though; I couldn’t help laughing at him.’

  ‘And Bunnett was not the sort of person calculated to enjoy the joke, was he?’ said Nigel.

  Herbert Cammison regarded him seriously. ‘No. He was not. And I may as well tell you at once that I think whoever removed him ought to be given free beer for the rest of his life by the State. He was the worst kind of anti-social pest, and decent society would clap him straight in jail—well
, his type simply wouldn’t be able to exist in a properly run community. However, that’s beside the point. His—er—advances to Sophie were only a symptom—of secondary consideration, really, compared to——’

  Sophie Cammison chuckled. She was almost her own old equable self again for a moment. ‘Darling,’ she said, pressing her husband’s hand, ‘I’m sorry my honour comes so low in your scale of values.’

  ‘Your honour can take care of itself—very efficiently, I should say,’ he replied with unimpaired gravity. ‘The employees at the brewery were less invulnerable. Anyway, after a bit Bunnett laid off Sophie—temporarily, at any rate. It was just then that I began to find out things about the brewery. A number of my panel patients were employed there, and there were far too many accidents and cases of occupational sickness. It’s not my business to listen to gossip; on the other hand, I don’t believe that a doctor should refuse to concern himself with social conditions; He ought to be at least as interested in preventing disease as in curing it.’

  ‘Hear! Hear!’ said Nigel. ‘How admirable these quaint old Chinese beliefs are.’

  ‘We’ll take what I heard first,’ proceeded Dr Cammison, in the preoccupied tones of one lecturing a group of students over an operating table. ‘I heard that Bunnett always employed married men where possible, so that he could have a stronger hold over them. I received the impression that his employees were really frightened of him—he was perpetually turning up in different places and standing silently behind them while they were at work–it got on their nerves, one of them told me, so that they began to get flurried and make mistakes; and then, of course, Bunnett had them where he wanted them.’

  ‘Yes, Sorn told me about a case of that this afternoon. Someone actually being sick—what was his name? Ed Parsons.’

  ‘Yes, and there was more to Ed Parsons’ case than you know. Well, those are just examples. I heard a good many more. Of course, there are always chaps who can’t live without a grievance, and no doubt some of what I heard was exaggerated. But there must have been a sizeable fire where one got such a hell of a lot of smoke. Things came to a head, as far as I was concerned, when I was called in to attend one of their lorry-drivers who had had a bad smash on Honeycombe Hill—just outside the town. From the evidence given in court afterwards, it was perfectly obvious that the driver had been overworked, compelled to run to an impossible schedule, and had dropped off to sleep though sheer exhaustion. Bunnett, being who he was, got off with the minimum fine: he celebrated the occasion by sacking the driver. That sort of thing goes on constantly, of course: it pays the employers—they gain more over the time and labour-saving than they lose over an occasional fine. Actually it wasn’t the injustice of this sort of thing in the abstract that compelled me to take a hand; it was the effect of hearing that poor chap, in delirium after the accident, saying over and over again, “I can’t make it! Christ, I’m sleepy! It’s bloody murder! I can’t make it! The governor’ll turn me off! It’s bloody murder, that’s what it is! I’m sleepy! Christ, I’m sleepy!”